position. A quick check with his finger showed him the barrel was clear. If he had picked up an obstruction at the other end during his silent crawl through the jungle, well, that was a risk he would have to take, as there was no way to be certain now. He removed from his bandolier an M-433 HEDP round. The High Explosive, Dual Purpose round could, if fired straight on, penetrate up to two inches of armor plate, and had an effective kill radius of five meters. For several meters beyond that death zone, it would still cause casualties. It was, therefore, the perfect weapon for attacking Orieza’s column of invaders.
Bolan pulled the barrel of the launcher to the rear, locking it in place with an audible click. Then he aimed for the driver’s-side front wheel of the lead deuce-and-a-half, flicked the safety to Fire and squeezed the launcher’s trigger in one fluid movement.
The grenade exploded on impact. The heavy HEDP round tore apart the engine block and cab of the cargo truck, spraying deadly shrapnel in all directions. Men screamed, and for a moment the pitch-black of the nighttime jungle was lit with an actinic yellow-white glare as the Honduran troops scattered.
Bolan smoothly ejected the spent round, loaded another HEDP grenade, aimed and fired. This time he took the truck at the rear of the column, blowing it apart between its cab and its cargo bed. He punched a third round into the vehicle next to it. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he caught, in the ensuing explosion, a glimpse of one of the vehicle’s heavy tires flattening a pair of men who had been crouching next to it, as the burning circles of textured rubber became airborne missiles.
Bolan shucked the spent casing, fed another grenade into the launcher and punched the HEDP into one of the Saladins. The angle wasn’t good, but his goal was to create confusion and chaos. As the first scattered, unaimed bursts of return fire began—panic shooting, and nothing more—he knew he had succeeded. Flicking his M-16 A-3 to full-auto, he stalked forward into battle.
Hell had come to Honduras.
CHAPTER TWO
Spraying full-auto bursts on the run, the Executioner aimed in the general direction of the nearest invading troops. He wasn’t concerned with hitting them; he wanted them to hear the gunfire and respond. Moving as quickly as he was, in a full sprint, he could have aimed precisely if he wished, but he could move faster by focusing on his destination: the nearest of the Saladins.
The six-wheeled light tank was an old British model equipped with a single 76-mm gun. Typically, such a vehicle also mounted coaxial and antiaircraft 7.62-mm machine guns, but Bolan saw no evidence of such weapons mounted externally on his target. There was no gun atop the turret, and the barrel of the machine gun that would otherwise poke from the turret parallel to the main gun was missing, the hole sealed and painted over.
The all-welded steel hull of the Saladin—more an armored car than a tank, really—had been painted a sloppy camouflage pattern more or less suitable to the jungle environment surrounding him. As he ran, his mind was already sorting through his extensive military knowledge, as if calling up an imaginary file. The Saladin, developed by the British in the 1950s, predated tracked light armor like the Scorpion combat reconnaissance vehicle, the Saladin’s British successor. This specimen, from what little Bolan could see of it, was likely quite old, probably manufactured in the late sixties or early seventies. It would have a gas-guzzling 8-cylinder engine mounted at the rear—though this could have been upgraded to diesel, for all he knew—and a crew of two or three. The driver would be seated forward, behind a hinged hatch, and the gunner would be to the left of the center-mounted turret. If there was a third man, a loader for the gun, he would be seated to the right of that center position.
None of this mattered. Bolan had no time to waste, not if he didn’t want to be bracketed and gunned down. He reached the tank, leaped onto the hull and pulled a pair of M-67 fragmentation grenades from his harness. Then he yanked the pin with his thumb and jammed the bombs down the barrel of the 76-mm gun.
He continued to run as gunfire erupted with much greater force around him. The muffled, staggered explosions came five seconds each after he’d pulled the grenades’ pins, doing the men inside the Saladin no good and hopefully at least distracting and confusing them. It was doubtful the blasts would cause any serious damage, given that the gun was designed to contain the force of the shells it fired, but there was at least a chance that the grenades might cause a problem. At the very least, the explosions would add to the insanity Bolan was manufacturing for the enemy to experience.
He was just getting started. He jacked open the M-203 launcher and loaded an M-576 buckshot round. Then he crouched, blending into the dancing shadows, and paused.
The enemy fire became even more intense. They were shooting in all directions, lit by the dancing fires of the burning vehicles. It was clear they thought they were being attacked from all sides, which was what Bolan wanted them to think.
The Executioner waited for the first knot of confused, frantic soldiers to close on his position, shouting to one another in Spanish. They were craning their necks at the tree line beyond their clearing, shooting sporadically into it, their fear-twisted features lit by the muzzle-flashes of their M-16 rifles. Bolan counted to three and, when they had come as close as they were likely to, he triggered the M-203.
The withering blast of buckshot from the giant bore of the 40-mm grenade launcher cut them down at waist level, leaving them broken and screaming, killing the nearest of the men who had taken the brunt of the widespread blast. Bolan was up then, squeezing precise bursts from his M-16 A-3, a veteran and virtuoso on the trigger of the familiar weapon. Soldiers, little more than thugs, fell before Bolan, who was himself the most lethal soldier they would ever encounter.
He paused, loaded another HEDP round in the M-203, and blasted yet another parked truck. The deafening sound of countless automatic weapons rolled over him in waves, much like the clouds of fitful, caustic smoke that poured from the burning vehicles. Two of the Saladins were mobile now, and one got its 76-mm gun working. It barked in Bolan’s general direction, off by many meters, the shots themselves random.
Bolan was rapidly using the ordnance with which the Farm had equipped him, but he saw no reason to hold back now. He loaded yet another HEDP grenade and, moving in a half crouch through the smoke, avoiding clumps of wildly shooting Honduran soldiers, he angled around to the rear of the closer Saladin. Lining up on the other six-wheeled tank, he punched it hard with his grenade.
The battered vehicle shuddered, but through the haze and the strobe lights of the enemy guns Bolan couldn’t tell how badly he had damaged it. Predictably, the turret traversed to bracket the Saladin next to which Bolan squatted. The soldier sprinted clear as the wounded tank fired again, this time hitting the closer vehicle.
Bolan stopped near the corpse of one of the fallen Honduran military men. He scooped up the boonie hat that many of the soldiers wore, and planted it on his own head. Then, trusting that his silhouette more closely resembled those of the invading troops, he started running urgently from group to group and shouting in Spanish, pointing at the next cluster of frenzied shooters.
Bolan hit the dirt as answering fire threatened to cut him down. The soldiers were soon eagerly, desperately shooting into their own numbers. The cry that infiltrators were among them was taken up by others. In the fusillades that ensued, Bolan was forced to roll close to one of the still-undamaged trucks to avoid the wild automatic gunfire. It wasn’t long before those in charge began shouting in Spanish for the men to cease firing. At least one of these voices was cut short, screaming, when someone else trained a gun on the man and pulled the trigger.
Creeping along over the flattened undergrowth that had been crushed by the wheels of the enemy column’s vehicles, Bolan held his rifle along his side, careful to keep it from dragging. He drew the Beretta 93-R machine pistol, flicked the
